


Who Wants To Live Forever

by theoddling



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Highlander AU, Highlander Immortals, I thought a thing, Suicidal Thoughts, You're Welcome, and then I made it sad, or at least implications of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24062050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoddling/pseuds/theoddling
Summary: Jaskier is not immortal, but rather is An Immortal. What better way to keep your head than to hook up with a witcher and pretend to be helpless?But time marches onward. And all things must end.
Kudos: 24





	Who Wants To Live Forever

He would be needing a new name soon. “Jaskier” had gotten a little too popular and started bringing the wrong kind of attention. In the last town, while Geralt was off fighting a particularly vicious vampire who had been plaguing the region, a hunt that he said was too dangerous for Jaskier to tag along on, he had encountered another of his kind. 

“We don’t have to do this,” Jaskier offered. “I just want to be on my way, entertaining the masses. I don’t care about the Game.”

“Well I do,” the other man sneered. “If you don’t want to fight, just stand still and let me have your head.”

“I said I didn’t care for it, not that I was willing to surrender and die.” His sword came out in a flash from where it lay, hidden, along the back of his lute case.

He held it before him, waving slightly, taunting the other swordsman. The man was larger than Jaskier, with a massive two-handed broadsword, clearly the sort to rely on brute strength over actual skill or talent. 

“Last chance, don’t make me do this.” Jaskier’s eyes were stormy and the warning firm, dropping all the cheer of his normal tone of voice. 

“Hah! You can’t possibly think you’ll win!” The man lunged, a move Jaskier was easily able to sidestep, graceful as a dancer compared to the lumbering fool.

“Okay, so we’re doing this.”

The fight was over even faster than Jaskier had predicted, the other man bleeding and on his knees, sword in the dirt far from him and Jaskier’s blade pressed to his throat. 

“Promise me you will leave, never trouble me again, and you can still walk away from this,” he offered, pacing in a circle, never taking his eyes off his enemy.

The other man spit at his feet. “Just kill me already. You know how this goes, know the rule.”

“I do.” The bard sighed, raising his sword back and swinging it down viciously. “There can be only one.”

The storm rolled in from nowhere, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He quickly set about tucking his lute and doublet into a safe spot, sheltered from what was to come by a trough, upturned and placed on the distant edge of the open field.

The first strike of lightning drove him to his knees with a scream. It was unsurprising that the man, with all of his self-assuredness and aggression, was a powerful player. Still, that meant this part, never his favorite experience, would particularly suck today. He could only hope he recovered and made it back to the inn to change out of bloodstained clothes before Geralt noticed. Someday, he might tell the witcher the truth, but it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have now.

~  


It was funny, he thought, how easy time escaped you when you knew that you had centuries. He hadn’t considered that when he’d attached himself to Geralt, all the way back in Posada, those witchers live an extraordinarily long time if they’re not killed by the creatures they hunt. And Destiny had been kind. The pair had managed to keep each other alive for so very long. Yennefer was of course, a sorceress, and the closest thing to truly immortal besides his own kind that he knew of. The one time she seemed to have died, it failed to hold her. Even when they added Ciri to their little family, she was a child with something magical about her, and seemed just as determined to outlive the average human, by will alone if she had to. 

But he knew all too well that, whether it be a ballad or an adventure or a life, all things must end. Even love could only keep something for so long, and a life was not a flower, to be pressed between pages and held close with care until it was preserved for eternity. 

If he had been able to keep them, it wouldn’t have been fair. The world had moved on. It was tame now, and quiet, with no need of monster hunters and mages in the wake of science and settlement. Geralt had seen it long before him, proclaiming that the world had no place for witchers anymore, and Jaskier had denied it, fleeing from the idea as if it was the worst monster they’d ever faced. 

The four of them had stopped their adventuring near Oxenfurt. Jaskier had taken up teaching full time, Geralt guest-lectured when he wasn’t busy running the orphanage he’d founded. Even Yennefer occasionally deigned for a class or two, and then got bored of it and went back to her usual…whatever. Ciri was the least settled, serving as a diplomat and travelling the world still, only coming home on occasion to visit.

He never did tell any of them about his particular affliction. It wasn’t that he’d intentionally deceived them, but with their own longevity it never seemed relevant. Ciri was the only one who ever questioned it, once late at night while they both sat up with a cup of tea. He had shrugged and told her that he was nothing special, just very long lived. Which hadn’t technically been a lie, there were in fact a number of his kind (he didn’t know exactly how many but he’d wondered more than once), and her suspicious glare told him that he hadn’t completely fooled her, but she had dropped it anyway. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t admit everything, but after so long of avoiding it, it had come as a reflex to deflect.

~

The occasional challenger came for his head, and always he offered them the chance to walk away. He had no interest in power or being the last man standing. He just wanted all the time he could to read and wonder and learn, to love the world and love the three people he called home.

“Come back in a century,” he would say, “come back when they’ve left me. Maybe then I will give you my head; I will have no more need of it once I’ve lost my heart.”

When they refused, he would lead them away from the city, dispatch them quickly. He was not one to toy with his competitors, or even to take their heads if he could prevent it. A last offer of mercy, a feigned distraction to let them escape, a dive into the sea to end things a bit early.

~

Losing Yennefer had been…confusing. She had been caught up in some sort of magical accident at Aratuza that had left the magical school a crater of ash and smoke and death. At first, none of them believed that she was truly gone. After all, she had survived a fatal event before. But as weeks, and then months passed, they began to accept it. Geralt openly wept; Ciri returned early from her latest assignment, heartbroken and hollow, and tried to be strong for her adoptive father. And Jaskier carried on, the stability they sought as their world turned upside down. 

Geralt had the unique honor of being the only witcher in all of history to die of natural causes, fading away in bed, a peaceful sleeping death. At the funeral, Jaskier had laughed about how he would have hated the distinction. They buried him beside Yennefer’s empty grave, and every three weeks they refreshed the wreaths of lilacs and forget-me-nots against the headstones. 

It was just Jaskier and Ciri for a long time after that. He occasionally nudged her toward other people, suggesting that romantic connection and a family and all of that typical stuff might be more enjoyable than spending the rest of her days a spinster with her dear uncle. Secretly, it was because he was afraid. He didn’t know if he could handle losing her too, and if he saw her happily settled with someone who wasn’t him, he could disappear into the night, reinvent again, and not have to face the reality that such a day would come. It might hurt, but not as much as watching her die. 

She refused. It had led to a horrific fight once, and they didn’t speak for months. He thought to leave then, but couldn’t bring himself to let their end be angry. So instead he had watched the Last Rose of Cintra blossom and grow, and eventually wilt, as all things did. By that time, the world was nothing like her youth, and a part of her had decided that it was time to move on from it, that it wasn’t meant for her anymore.

“But what about you, Jaskier?” she asked, lips dry and voice rasping. “You never aged, and will be the last of us. What will you do?”

“I am a bard above all else, and consummately able to adapt. I’ll carry on, and carry all of you with me.”

The night he buried the princess beside her parents, he used his savings to buy a boat, too small a craft to be called a ship, something he could pilot alone. The world was changing, and he needed time. A few years adrift to come to terms with who he should become, with everything that had gone.

He looked at the map and set his sails toward a little, distant point on it, marked now with his own flowing script as well as the cartographer’s.

“Here there [might still] be monsters.” 

One could only hope. Otherwise, he might come back around and just let one of those pernicious little upstarts with only decades under their belt have him. Let pride be damned and it be said that only the witcher kept him alive all those years.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi y'all. As usual, finals has led to a deep case of The Sad. This is the first product of that state.


End file.
